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Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

zdnet.com

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Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#61

The idea of Adobe focusing on using Flash to create native apps is a great idea -- and I'll think they'll do well with it. There's an army of folks who know ActionScript who don't want to learn Objective-C, and there are tons of apps which are created for ad agnecies where development speed matters.

There's an army of folks who know ActionScript who don't want to learn Objective-C, and there are tons of apps which are created for ad agnecies where development speed matters.

Those apps tend to overlap with the tons of apps that nobody wants.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#62
post #17

One of the nicer things about Flash is that it's easy to block en masse, which cuts out on so many visually distracting animated things. One of my worries with HTML5 is that we won't have a good heuristic for preventing animation and video. As it is, YouTube occasionally serves me up their HTML5 video player, and it's a significantly worse experience than the Flash one, for the simple reason that it autoplays, wherea…

On the contrary, disabling CSS transitions and animations is going to be a dead easy way to disable animation without losing any functionality.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#63
post #5

If true, I believe it would be healthy for the mobile web. There are still developers out there who believe that Adobe will come up with a decent mobile Flash experience, even though it has failed to deliver on those promises for the better part of a decade. If Adobe just comes out says "Not gonna happen", we can all move on and invest our time and energy in technologies that actually have a future.

Unfortunately, users are still going to be demanding for a while that their online flash games work.

95% of them will never work anyway since they rely on having a pointer and hover actions.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#65
post #49

This is going to do a lot of harm to Flash on the web. Now we know for sure that any Flash web pages will never work on mobile devices. Mobile apps are great but I still think the majority of people will use their devices as web browsing devices. Finally, it really destroys your trust in Adobe. Will they discontinue their mobile AIR tools if they have a few more bad quarters?

> Finally, it really destroys your trust in Adobe. Will they discontinue their mobile AIR tools if they have a few more bad quarters?

That's an interesting and relevant question, but it also nicely shows why the whole idea of requiring proprietary plugins to view web content was a bad idea (tm) in the first place.

Hate to say it, but Jobs was right about two things when he defended the lack of Flash support on iOS: it performed like crap, and it was a liability since you'd had to rely on Adobe to support it.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#67

Disappointing as it may be, it's realistic. I could never see mobile devices being capable of loading and running flash based games or web environments consistently or seamlessly. It just requires too much power the device doesn't have. Even the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 dual core technology aren't up to the task, and I believe that's the closest mobile ever came to supporting flash. But even mini laptops can just barely…

Flash for video works beautifully on the Transformer. I use it to stream anime all the time. I do hope I will still be able to do so, one way or the other.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#70
post #66

Flash in mobile web browsers always felt awkward and sluggish to me. I'm glad that they'll be focusing their mobile efforts towards polishing AIR

But isn't AIR just flash? I am somewhat confused.

AIR is a deployment platform for both WebKit and Flash, and as of AIR3 the support for HTML5 has improved quite a bit:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/ajax/articles/air_and_webkit...

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